


The Sunlight Swerve

by whitesilverandmercury



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, and feel out the world, and prob suck, fluffy af, in which i explore character, ramble fic, srsly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 05:06:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9970805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: Sometimes the quiet between them is electric and Keith is afraid to move, afraid to speak, afraid to breathe should a shock jolt through and burn him out — // And Lance can taste the Arizona dust in his own mouth like he did the day he met Keith the second time.





	

**Author's Note:**

> hi yes hello i have no idea what this is, it just sort of happened, little bit of _awful_ ficlet rambling; i'm still working on other projects, but i’ve been drowning in headcanons the last few days so i took a small break to just sort of feel this shit out i guess.

* * *

 

 **i.** cute,  _adj_. –  _quaintly interesting or pretty, attractive, taking; applied to people as well as things, with the sense ‘attractive, pretty, charming’_

Lance does not believe Keith has the word  _cute_ in his vocabulary, judging by the fact that he never uses it himself and any time Lance does, those eyes veer dark and skeptical to him like he’s just spoken in alien tongue, presumably an insult. But Keith is  _cute_.

Cute when he doesn’t know he’s doing that thing with his mouth, deep in thought, tongue rolling along the inside of his lip as his frown twists off to one side and then the other. When he struts that bad boy strut of his, the one with the even, confident stride, back straight, chin inclined. The one that says  _Don’t fuck with me because I’ll fall apart pretty fast_. When he’s raking his hands through his hair over and over and over again to tie it in half a half-back, sloppy, coming loose around his eyes and his ears and the back of his neck, red jacket knotted at his hips as the sleeves of his T-shirt flirt with his smooth arms and in an old, unused hangar turned storage room he assails his stockpile of ancient tech trinkets he finds at this or that stop on this or that planet, like his very own space pirate outpost or pawn shop, grey-grease-stained knuckles, smudged cheek, him and his archaic Walkman his dad found in some junk which he found in some of his dad’s junk with a tape of some band called Pearl Jam. Pidge likes to watch him, they make small talk, he puts his headphones on with one ear half free when she starts to go on about newer tech and transforming the vintage junk into something more modern, hybrid, digital space steampunk rovers and automatons. His eyes slide to Lance over Pidge’s shoulder. Brows raise. Little smirk, twitch of the mouth. Because he knows it’s pointless, these dumb projects. Maybe he just wants to prove he can still do what he did on Earth.

He’s cute when he’s flustered and frustrated, can’t get the words out except in chopped-off syllables and little growls in the back of the throat. Cute when he doesn’t think — doesn’t know — pretends not to know Lance is watching him, and his face is empty and his lashes lowered and Keith is cutest when he is at Lance’s door in the middle of the night, his insomniac’s hair a tousled laurel about his face, the heart shape of it softer when it’s not washed out by artificial light, softer and younger and completely pathetic in the rawest sense of the word — expressive, and full of feeling, of  _pathos_ , the  _pathos_ of a young man whose fatal flaws streak like comets across the sky, back at home, at base, where it curved over the desert instead of swallowed them up whole.

“I can’t sleep alone lately,” he said the first time, and if it had been in the day — or — whatever day is anymore — the surliness of it would have been sharp and lofty. But it was not; it was dark in the dorm wing of the ship, so it only came across moderately sulky, surprisingly innocent, predictably stubborn, disarmingly vulnerable.

“Okay,” Lance says when it happens again, and again, and not much later again.

“Okay,” Keith always replies, and sometimes he brings his blanket but usually it’s just his pillow, his pillow and his bedhead and his shorts and his shoulders curving firm but supple from his tank, his grumpy glances like  _Don’t you tell anyone_  that are yielding but unyielding at once.

When they share the blanket, his knees bump up against Lance’s sometimes, but more often than not it’s his toes burying under his calf, his ankle. Elbow in the ribs once. Fingers curled limp and warm nudging up against his temple and that is definitely when Keith is at his cutest, utterly peaceful and soft beside him, unaware of his own frailty, face half buried, brow relaxed, lips gently parted and body rising, falling, rising, falling with steady breath.

He is almost always —  _almost_ — gone when Lance wakes up, sprawled twisted in blankets around his bed on his stomach. He knows because the bed is empty and an empty bed is an unsettling thing sometimes. He knows because he can smell him even though he’s gone and his pillow is gone and the warmth and weight of his body are gone, but in a sense, it’s kind of like he’s not gone at all.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.** pathetic,  _adj_. –  _producing an effect upon the emotions; moving, stirring, affecting_

And Lance feels pathetic every time he looks at him and thinks he wants to pluck the stars from his eyes. Sometimes in a good way. Sometimes in a bad way. Mostly in a good way when Keith catches him, flutter of lashes across that grey-blue firmament, perks in the tiny sort of smile on reserve for moments like this when they’re alone and he doesn’t feel self-conscious showing a bit of God damn heart. He’s like that. He is afraid of being afraid and he feels guilty for feeling. Lance understands those things. He’s just worse off than Keith is for hiding it. Then again, Keith is still their child raised by wolves sometimes, so maybe he’s just awkward. Lance laughs and Keith’s smile goes out like a light, he gives Lance’s shoulder a weak but deliberate shove, says, “What the fuck, beach boy?” and Lance can taste the Arizona dust in his own mouth like he did the day he met Keith the second time.  

 

* * *

 

 **iii.** meaningful,  _adj_. –  _full of meaning or expression, significant; communicating something that is not explicitly or directly expressed_

His eyes roll open hard; Keith hovers over him in an instant, gaze blazing wide somehow in the dark. Lance chokes on a sound something like a laugh tangled up with a gasp as his heart thuds hollow in his throat, skin cold as the adrenaline seizes every branch and ending of nerve then quickly flees, leaves him buzzing and confused. He doesn’t know what startles him most — jerking awake from the nightmare, or Keith already hanging over him like he knew the second he left dreaming, or the way Keith’s concern is as hot and intent as his anger.

“What?” Lance presses, embarrassed, dread leadening in his gut as he scrubs at his face and tries to ground himself, check to make sure he’s actually awake. “What’s wrong?” 

Keith crushes a skeptical laugh to the roof of his mouth. “Why are you asking  _me?_ You’re the one who just woke up gasping like you forgot how to breathe.”

Space is horrifying.

There is nothingness and yet there is everything, and everything is somehow nothingness. Lance remembers Lucretius; back at home, his dad’s den is stuffed with books by people so long dead they could not be real people at all. Military leaders, philosophers, political theorists. Lining the curving walls of the library all the way until the long window that overlooks the neighborhood, the winding pavement, as it all coils down the hill to the glowing shore. Watching storms come in during the fall from that window is a sight that has to be seen to be known.

And anyway — Lucretius was the one who said everything is nothingness and somewhere up here with all the stars and strange faces sit the gods, unmoved and unmoving. Somewhere up here with all the stars, and Blue’s mouth wouldn’t open, and Lance was begging, and he was shouting, and he was trying not to cry from fury and from shock and he kicked and batted and clawed at the big, cold jaws, suspended with the gods in the nothingness,  _Let me in, let me in, I’m good enough, why won’t you let me in_ —

Lance clears his throat. “Weird dream,” he concedes, noncommittal, voice faint. He jerks on the blanket with a tightened fist and hooked arm as he throws himself around to lay on his side. His shirt sticks to his back, between the shoulder blades, cold sweat. He can’t figure out how they’d been laying before, cramped together in the bed, but the proximity of their shoulders and elbows is a little suspicious. “Lay down, it’s fine.”

Keith doesn’t lay down.

“Keith, I told you, if you keep me up, we’re not sleeping together anymore.”

The bed only moves again when Lance flops around to shoot Keith a pointed look, but Keith halts him with a meaningful flick of those dark eyes. There is nothing for a moment but that, a gentle rustle of the blankets as he finally does lay down, slowly, like a cat curling in for a nap. His eyes dart away through the cool calm knowing murmur of, “I know. Sometimes when I sleep alone, I have nightmares, too.”

 

* * *

 

 **iv.** intimate, _adj._  –  _of knowledge or acquaintance: involving or resulting from close familiarity; close._ _or, of a relation between things: involving very close connection or union; very close._

 _Intimate_ is not having to speak for something to be understood. It is knowing so much about a person that you can just coexist in the same space at the same moment without needing to mention it even when other times it feels as though one knows nothing at all. Maybe it’s something like what soldiers feel, if the five of them here count as soldiers, this whittling down of unnecessary social and conversational accoutrements to innocence and instinct, the bones of feeling. Secret language of hand gestures and glances, tips of the chin, flashing glances. Wrinkled nose. Hard scoff. To say with eye contact when the tongue fails,  _I actually don’t hate you_ and have said back,  _I know._ A mouth brushing open, closed, open and closed again like a whisper with no sound, no shape but all the meaning in the world, because sometimes words are too fragile and faulty to be intimate.

 

* * *

 

 **v.** electric, _adj._  –  _suddenly exciting, thrilling, or intense, as if caused by an electric charge or shock; stimulating; charged with tension_

Old theories say life on Earth started with electricity. Maybe other life also began with a spark. Lance doesn’t know; he has no clue the ins and outs of Galra or Altean biological constitution, if they also have amino acids for the spark or if sparks can bring to life more than amino acids. 

Keith is a  _force majeure_ , charged deep with it — the raw, undiluted electricity of life. Conductor rod spine, coils in his fingertips, a lightning storm in those lovely grey-blue eyes so deep at times they might be indigo. What would it be like, Lance wonders, to possess even a measure of such wattage, even just some static electricity instead of short circuiting. God damn, but Keith is so annoying when he thinks he’s right even when he’s wrong, and Lance wonders what it would be like to so passionately believe in yourself whether you’re right or you’re wrong.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.** oceanic,  _adj._  –  _designating a longing for something vast and eternal_

Like a tide reaching and retreating again, on cue, to the wax and wane of the moon, Lance pushes Keith out only to pull him back in. Keith doesn’t blame him. If he were Lance, he’d push him away sometimes, too. The part Keith doesn’t understand is that it feels, now and again, that it is not for himself that Lance pushes, but for Keith’s sake. Hunk’s sake. Shiro’s sake. Pidge, Allura, everyone’s sakes. Like there is something too deep and dark in him from which he hopes to keep them safe.

And then he laughs, and tosses his head to one side, hands propped on hip. Catlike glance. Toothy smile. Runs his hand through his hair and leaves it a mess of short, gentle cowlicks and Keith fights the urge to reach out and smooth them down, lest his fingers accidentally dust the smooth shell of his ear or — God forbid — Lance ask him what the fuck he’s doing.

It’s just — it’s so odd to want to protect someone who seems hellbent on protecting others from protecting him.

It’s just — Lance plays carefree so well that Keith worries he won’t be able to tell when it’s honest or not, and it is jarring when his eyes take on a shadow that seems to vast and eternal for any of them to understand.

Just — so fucking  _weird_ how he can be so frustrated yet so fascinated with him at the same time —

Lance crests and crashes.

They are opposites and they are complements. He is bright where Keith is dark, even when the brightness is destructive like a radioactive supernova flash. He is everything cool where Keith is hot — Keith shouts, Lance hisses through his teeth — Lance slips a cold glance and Keith throws a scowl — and he craves it at times, a smooth place against which to press up when he is scalding himself, simmer against sweet sighs and cool, drifting glances like the way water drifts against the skin, sliding, moving, caressing, pressing, becoming one and breaking away and becoming one again, encasing in nothingness at the same time as somethingness.

Sometimes the quiet between them is electric and Keith is afraid to move, afraid to speak, afraid to breathe should a shock jolt through and burn him out —

“Hey … ”

In the nest of shadows in his bed, Lance lifts his head from his pillow with a little feline arch of his back and shoulders, blinking, a knot in his sleepy brow. “Hey,” he replies.

Keith shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again, throat tight. He drums his hand on the smooth wall, elbows his pillow a bit closer to his side. “I can’t sleep,” he mutters.

Lance wiggles around a bit, shoving blankets this way and that until he lifts the corner and raises his brows at Keith. Twitch of something at the corner of his mouth — he issues a gentle nod. “Yeah,” is all he says, riding the back of a little sigh. Tight. Short. Maybe he’s annoyed; maybe he feels obligated now. Tomorrow night, then, Keith won’t bother him —

Lance laughs lightly, raspy with interrupted sleep. Rubs his eyes with the balls of his palms and buries his fingers in his hair. “What, you gonna stand there and stare all night, you creep? Take me out to dinner first, I mean, come on … ”

The door slides closed behind him and Keith throws his pillow to the bed on his way over, smiling faint with a pleased sort of exasperation where Lance can’t see it.

 

* * *

 


End file.
